


Long Distance

by Kay (sincere)



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, Thor (2011)
Genre: Cell Phones, Cell phones are pretty weird aren't they?, F/M, Fluff, One-Sided Relationship, Past Relationship(s), Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-19
Updated: 2012-09-19
Packaged: 2017-11-14 14:43:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/516305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sincere/pseuds/Kay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was supposed to be an adventure, like in days of old. Instead, Sif finds herself once again left with the Warriors Three while Thor went all across Midgard with his new mortal friends. But she still has his voice, thanks to this... phone of cell?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Distance

**Author's Note:**

> This fulfills the _phonesex/epistolary_ square on my kink_bingo@DW card, but it is pretty much gen, no worries.

The phone of cell sat on the low table, its transparent display oddly similar to the clear glass embedded in the table. Sif ran over Thor's instructions and explanations in her mind, but she still felt intimidated by the device. It was small and intricate and made for the weaker touch of the Midgardians. Sif was not wholly comfortable with the idea of a powerful object -- obviously full of Midgardian sorcery -- that she could accidentally crush between two fingers.

She had already broken one. Stark had attempted to demonstrate its usage to her, and all at once it lit up, vibrating in her hand and making a loud noise. She had gasped and clenched her hand tightly around it, breaking apart its smooth shell and the circuitry beneath, then threw it to the ground and stomped on it.

It might have been an overreaction. Sif knotted her fingers in front of her, staring at the slim piece of machinery.

The noise in the hallway warned her of the arrival of her friends, but Volstagg paused in the doorway, taking her in. He asked immediately, "Did you forget how to work it so soon?"

She was about to deny it when Fandral slid into the room around him, his expression unsurprised and his tone cheerfully mocking. "Of course not, Volstagg! After all, the Lady Sif was bestowed this task by our sovereign prince himself. She is the only one of us who could be trusted to operate it correctly, instead of... eating it, probably! Or perhaps attempting to wear it as a fashionable accessory."

Sif straightened up, leaving her hands resting on her knees. "Oh, Thor did not doubt you could operate it," she shot back. "He doubted any of you were capable of telling the _truth_. Perhaps too many absurd tavern tales of your glorious deeds have finally taken a toll on your credibility?"

"We wouldn't lie when it _mattered_ ," he protested, holding his hand to his heart as if wounded by the words.

She rolled her eyes, unmoved. "Please. _If_ he could get you to stop talking about your dinner, or your dinner companions. Or get you to start talking, at all." She nodded at Hogun, who nodded back an acknowledgment.

Volstagg chuckled, heading for his room. "It grows late. If you delay longer, you may find Thor already at his sleep. As I intend to be!"

Hogun agreed, "And I."

"And I," Fandral said, peering at a napkin that looked like it had come from the tavern downstairs, "as soon as I find -- room 322, belonging to a Lady... Cyndi." He swept up the sack of his belongings and promptly turned, heading out again.

Sif shook her head, but soon enough, she was alone again with the telephone. She contemplated it a moment longer.

When Stark resignedly went to get a replacement telephone, Thor had bent his head to hers and explained that it allowed people to communicate over long distances, all around Midgard. It simply had to be charged with electrical power each night via a cord that could be inserted into holes on the wall of the building. Each phone of cell had a unique string of numbers, and by inputting the number of his telephone into her telephone using the tiny buttons, it would awaken his, and they would be able to hear one another's voices simply by holding them to their ears.

Volstagg was correct; she could not delay if she intended to report in to Thor as he had requested. She had powered the device at the wall socket when they acquired the room, before going to dinner. The string of numbers that would enable it to contact Thor's cellular telephone was already entered into it, so all she would have to do was touch his name on the screen.

There were no further excuses. Sif steeled her shoulders and picked up the phone of cell, carefully. She pressed his name, and the telephone's display informed her that it was 'Dialing Thor'.

She put it uncertainly to her ear, and jumped, pulling it away again. It was making a strange gurgling noise, frankly alarming, and she forced herself not to destroy it again. Stark would not so easily be able to provide her with a replacement this time. She must _trust_ that the device was working as intended, and was not malfunctioning, and that any moment she would hear...

_"Sif!"_

Thor's familiar voice cut through the gurgling sound, which thankfully did not return, and Sif relaxed. "I hear you," she said, pleased in spite of herself. She could feel her own smile, and could only imagine how foolish she would have looked to any who might have seen it -- or sound, to the one who would hear her now. She tamped down firmly on her wide grin. "I must admit, I had my reservations about these Midgardian contraptions. But I should have trusted your word."

Thor chuckled, his voice like raw velvet, and so clear. _"I do not hold that against you. I did not believe it so easily myself, when it was explained to me. And, truth be told, even now I still worry when I am forced to rely on them for important matters such as this."_

She straightened self-consciously at that reminder. "Yes, of course. Allow me to put your mind to rest quickly, then."

_"Start with disembarking from the Quinjet. Tell me everything."_

She found that she was more comfortable standing, pacing slowly about the room as she focused on her task and recounted all the day's events. It was her opinion that she had not encountered any of the oddities Thor sought in her tale, but she related the facts as best she could, and allowed him to form his own opinion.

Only rarely did she allow herself to wonder at the device. She heard his voice without any sense of distance, carrying directly to her ear from halfway around the realm with only the slightest flatness of sound. She could almost believe -- if she closed her eyes -- that he was right behind her.

She closed her eyes.

"You are not wrong, Sif," Thor said, heavily. "You have not yet encountered any signs of Loki's mischief, I think."

She longed for the days when she could simply have slammed Loki's head into a pillar to make him repent his actions; then he would apologize to Thor, and the darkness would clear from him as if it had never been. Thor had forgiven countless transgressions that way, and all had been well, even Loki seeming to be happier and more relaxed once someone had forced him to look past himself.

But those days were gone now. "It is good news, Thor," Sif said, low and reassuring. "It means we may yet stop it before it is begun."

"I know, but it is disheartening when we still do not know what we are looking for. If you had seen -- strange weather patterns, or unusual aggression in the populace -- at least we would know."

Thor sighed, a breath into her ear. Sif closed her eyes again, and then said, "Then you have found nothing more productive?" solely for something to say, to get him to talk to her again instead of brood.

"No, we had similarly little luck, I am afraid," he admitted. "Barton has explained much of the local culture here in this land of 'China'. It is truly amazing what variety they have here in this single ralm. Everywhere I go, it is yet different. I have seen cities that were crowded and rose high into the sky, and cities with the most pristine, beautiful oceanside vistas. I have seen quiet deserts and abandoned forests... And everywhere the people seem entirely different, some welcoming, some preoccupied, some mistrusting, some fascinated. It is all quite strange to me."

His voice had warmed as he spoke, until the traces of sorrow that haunted his thoughts of his brother were gone, leaving behind a contained wonder. Sif smiled reluctantly. "You love it here," she said.

"Is that so odd? There are so many new sights and ideas... Who would not?"

A gulf stretched between them, a silence that she could hear over hundreds of miles, a distance surpassed only by the gulf of their opinions. Sif had quickly grown displeased with the rough denim trousers they had given her to wear, and Thor had not. She thought it was strange and alien how they had gadgets to help them in every aspect of their daily lives, and he thought it a stirring testament to their ingenuity. She had come to find their fragile, quick lives discomfiting, and he found it compelling. Sif could not wait for the mission to be over, so that she would be able to return home.

Thor could not wait for its end, so that he might explore and learn and experience this realm on his own time.

She endured it for him, she reminded herself, and said gamely, "I wonder. Certainly not Fandral! Let me tell you about the woman he met on our way through the port before we left..."

The topic thus changed, Sif told him the tale: how Fandral had become enchanted by a woman in a tunic without any fabric in the back, charmed her with his prattling, and tried to allow the security to have her board the airship with him. The black-suited soldiers of SHIELD did not care for this idea, and so he had railed at their unchivalrous ways, their cruelty in the face of budding romance, until one of their female soldiers told him that she would sit next to him for the trip if it would silence him. Fandral had conceded happily.

She heard fabric shifting as his laughter faded, and her mind instinctively sought to explain the sound: he was shedding his clothing, she realized after a beat more of listening. An act that she must have seen thousands of time in their centuries of camaraderie, sometimes intimate, just the two of them; more often as friends, playing and adventuring together.

But suddenly Sif was acutely aware that she was alone, in a bedroom, imagining Thor and picturing him undressing. It felt like she was fantasizing, and abruptly she felt a combination of ashamed and cross with herself.

She brushed away the thought. "It feels odd, communicating this way," she mused.

"I must agree."

"Almost like I speak to myself, alone in this empty room," Sif admitted. Her fingers found the hem of her flimsy Midgardian tunic and fretted with it. "As if your voice is but my imagination."

Thor chuckled, his voice lowering. It was an intimate pitch, private. For her alone. A voice he had once used idling in her bed. "I know the feeling," he said again. "There is a part of me, as well, that cannot take this conversation seriously, even knowing it is real."

She smiled. She should have chastised herself again for the reminder of what no longer was, but he sounded so supportive, so understanding; he told her he felt the same way, that he suffered the same thoughts. (Which only made it seem more like imagination.) Instead of criticizing, she found herself thinking of different times, perhaps better times. She could not say if that was worse or not.

"It is late at night, and I am alone, and I am... talking to Thor," Sif said again, and then abandoned her sternly proper pose, moving to the bed and dropping down onto it, legs folded. "How could it be that anything I say here will still be present in the morning? Only I should be able to hear it. I feel like I could say anything at all."

She paused, and then her lips curled up, and she lifted her voice in a low husky song, "For we sit by the fire and drink till we're tired and start to consider our beds; then one calls for more and we let out a roar, and go on till we can't lift our heads! Another, another, the mug to my hand to my mouth, another..."

"You sing for me, Lady Sif?" Thor asked, delight in his tone.

"The opposite. I sing to myself, only because I know you should not hear it. I am no delicate maiden who dances and sings for my lord's pleasure."

"Ah, your words cut like blades," he mourned, though she could still hear him still laughing.

Then the words faded, and a hush fell. Sif tried to imagine him in the morning, telling his companion Barton about their conversation, but she could not. All her honed senses told her that she was alone: wrapped in the darkness of night, in a room silent except for her own breathing, on a mattress that bore only her own weight. Intellectually she knew, but the greater part of her still felt strongly as if this were all in her mind.

She said suddenly, "Tell me something that I do not know. Something you would not tell anyone."

Another pause rang out. She thought, _This will prove it. If he acts indignant or brushes it off, it is the Thor of my imagination, because that is the Thor of my childhood, my memory. If he answers something about me -- about us -- then I will know just as well that it is the Thor of my imagination, for he does not think about me in that way any longer. If it is about Jane Foster... It would have to be the real thing._

And then, slowly, at length, he said, "I miss my brother, Sif. No matter what anyone says, I would give all that I have to go back to our youth, when we were happy and knew no better. I have begged him to come home countless times since learning that he survived his fall from the Bifrost. And yet... I have never seen him without his Aesir guise. If I saw him as he truly is... I do not know how I would feel. Or if I could still muster the sincerity of my desire to see him home again."

_Ah,_ she thought. _Of course it would be Loki._

It was brought home to her like a slap to the face. This was Thor. The Midgardian sorcery of Stark's phone of cell was making it possible for her to speak to him, however alone she thought she was, however many countless miles separated them. He would remember, and perhaps tell his mortal friend.

Because she would never have guessed he would think of Loki. She had never understood the bond between the two vastly dissimilar brothers: one fair and kind, the other dark and spiteful.

"That is normal, Thor," she said, softly. To have learned that his kin was not only adopted, but not Aesir at all -- an ancient enemy, a monster they had always known to despise -- how could he be expected to simply forget a thousand years of certainty?

"But unacceptable in the only man who can bring him home," he answered, heavily.

Sif stroked her fingers over the hem of her tunic, and said, "Unacceptable is a harsh word. You judge yourself too much."

He said nothing in response to that, and then he seemed to force more lightness into his voice, saying, "Now, I believe it is your turn. Tell me something I do not know about my lady Sif."

That one was too easy. Sif chuckled to herself, quietly.

_I try not to look back on well-intended actions I took centuries ago with regret, but I still have feelings for you. Now that you wear your gentle heart on your sleeve, instead of burying it beneath bravado and confidence where only I could see it, I feel it only more. But you have given your heart to another, and I see that Jane and her realm make you happy. It is too late to say anything, because I would never wish to take that from you._

But this was Thor that she spoke to, alone in her bedroom late at night, and in the morning, he would remember. So the words she might have spoken before did not make it to her lips.

"After a confession such as that, I fear my secrets seem small and unimportant," she said ruefully. "I would not sully your honesty with trifles about how I sometimes sleep in the stables to attempt to relive our adventuring days."

That made him laugh, and she smiled to hear it. "I know this is a poor excuse for an adventure. When I return to Asgard, we will all go out together as we used to. How does that sound?"

Sif closed her eyes. "It sounds wonderful," she said.


End file.
